Saturday, June 9, 2012

Jason watches PROMETHEUS in 3-D

And overall, I liked it. It's not exactly an ALIEN prequel. It takes place in the ALIEN universe, and does give some background about the "Space Jockey" ruins they find in that movie. Not the exact Space Jockey guy, but his race and how they're related to the origins of mankind. Oops, I've already gone to far.

Okay, first the stuff I liked. The look, the atmosphere--I think Ridley Scott is incapable of making a movie that isn't at least visually engaging. And I liked Michael Fassbender, and particularly his biggest laugh line in the movie (I think it's in the trailers, so you probably know what I mean.) And I liked (and this surprised me that I liked it) that they specifically avoided using the Xenomorph Aliens from the original series. They do use variants on them. And I kinda liked the mysteries of human origins the movie sets up.

Now the stuff that didn't work for me. First and foremost, some (most) of the characters are pretty shallow, annoying, and stupid. Insisting on not taking weapons because it's a scientific expedition was just too obvious. The guy laughing at his scheme of sneaking a smoke inside his spacesuit was kinda dumb. And, as much as I hate to say this, I couldn't care less for Charlize Theron's character or her secret agenda.

And most importantly, the thing I'm on the fence about--the ending. I'll try to keep it relatively spoiler-free, but proceed at your own risk. The ending...isn't really an ending at all. The mysteries raised in the movie aren't answered, and in the end the survivor(s) go off to search more for the answers. It's not an ending, but a setup for a sequel. And I'm just not sure if I want that sequel.

On a final note, the 3-D was unnecessary, but also mostly unoffensive. It mostly avoids violating Jason's Rule of 3-D by not throwing too much stuff out of the screen at the audience. But it also doesn't really use the depth into the screen. I'm pretty sure I would've gotten the same experience in 2-D.

As an aside, the 3-D trailer for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN looked annoying as hell. The movie might be great, but at least in the trailer the 3-D is used pretty much solely for the gimmicky effect of throwing stuff out of the screen and making the audience flinch. In over 2 hours, PROMETHEUS violated Jason's rule maybe a couple of times (and that was with bits of silica flying around in a storm). In about a minute, the trailer for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN violated Jason's Rule about 5 times.